Every landing page, product description, tweet, and email are all examples of content. The keywords that users type into search engines, such as Google, are an attempt to locate content. The phrase “content is king” has never been truer.
One of the best ways to set yourself apart from your competition is to understand the benefits of content marketing and take advantage. This is a tool that will influence how your target market perceives your business. The good news, content marketing, which typically is, posting quality content can help you with that. This checklist from Scribly is a good starting point to develop a simple to use process & strategy.
Informative content educates, solves a problem, and helps earn trust from the audience. The trust positions you as a leading authority in the industry. Whether you’re marketing to consumers (B2C) or businesses (B2B), there are many benefits of content marketing. Here are the top 7.
1. Improves SEO Results
One of the most significant benefits of content marketing is improving search engine visibility. However, if your only reason for publishing content is to improve your ranking on search engines, it’s time you considered changing your strategy.
Whether it’s answering questions, solving problems, or for education, the content you post should add value to your readers. If your audience likes the content, you should expect search engines to love it too.
But, you need to create content based on what users type into search engines. Creating quality content around well-thought-out long-tail keywords can help your SEO strategy. Each new content on your website is another page for Google to index. The better quality content a page has, the higher it ranks on search engines.
2. Helps Build Trust With Your Target Audience
Relationships founded on trust and truth are more likely to go beyond free information into a profitable relationship for your company. The more value you provide for your site visitors, the more trust you can build over time. Publishing content that offers free advice and useful solutions without being “salesy” builds trust with your customers and prospects.
You can establish a relationship with your audience by informing, and educating them about their pain points and biggest challenges through content, like blog posts. Then, you can work to build trust by providing even more useful content.
Valuable content can also help build authority and credibility with your target audience. If your audience trusts your advice and information, they can easily purchase products and services that add value to their lives. You could recommend such products.
3. Builds Social Media Traffic
By not continuously publishing content on your social networks, you’re doing a disservice to your company. The key to creating content that continues to attract organic traffic after it’s posted is to concentrate on topics that will remain relevant to your visitors for long.
Publishing more content on social media, and regularly, will help keep your brand at the mind of prospects. If your content is of good quality, your existing clients will share it─ and this is a great way to increase your reach and exposure. Prospects are likely to trust an endorsement from their friends, so when your content is shared on social networks, it will likely drive traffic to your business.
4. Generates Leads
Content—especially free and useful content —is an excellent way to guide visitors to a landing page. When people check out your content, some may end up interested in buying from you in the future. One of the benefits of content marketing is that it helps to generate interest from leads.
The more your content delights prospects, the higher the chances they’ll click on your call-to-action (CTA) and move onto your landing page. Directly placing CTAs in your content can generate new prospects for your business. You can include your CTAs at the bottom of a post, on the side panel, inline, or in the hero.
5. Drives More Sales
Having lots of traffic and no sales is meaningless. Thankfully, one of the benefits of content marketing is driving more sales.
Businesses that consistently publish content experience higher conversion rates than those that only focus on traditional marketing. But keep in mind that buying is a process that people go through before committing to a purchase. For this reason, most of your visitors won’t be ready to shop with you the first time they learn about your business. Plus, the buying process is typically faster with tiny products than with larger products.
Before buying, individuals realize they have a problem that should be solved. To better understand the problem, they research. Then, they decide which solution can best solve the problem. A well thought out content marketing strategy can help prospects during all these stages by informing them of what they are searching for.
However, building a content marketing foundation that will drive more sales requires time and effort. As such, it sometimes can be challenging. To help you attract a clearly defined audience via content marketing, consider this option from Corberry Digital.
6. Helps Reduce Marketing Costs
Content marketing can reduce your marketing costs. As mentioned, content marketing only costs time and effort. It’s unbelievably cost-effective. Better yet, it offers compounding returns. It’s also safe, available for any person in various industries, and beneficial in many ways.
While your first few months might not yield any decent results, you should expect to see some growth in the next few months. Month after month, you’ll see more growth and more return on investment—which could triple in the next few years.
7. Grow Email Lists
Emails are an important component of content marketing. Target the right audience with your content and grow the size of your email list. Then, you can nurture leads by sending them relevant content.
One of the best ways to obtain email addresses is by using lead magnets. These occur in many forms, including free courses, cheat sheets, webinars, coupons, and assessment.
Conclusion
There are many benefits of content marketing. Besides, it’s an inexpensive way to better relationships with your clients, increase traffic, and improve conversion rates.
The benefits covered in this article can help you become the best in your business for the long haul. The earlier you adopt the ones that work for you, the earlier you’ll start seeing results.
